Listening with Rocks

Performance and workshop

As part of the third edition of The Listening Biennial, Bureau for Listening and Nana Francisca Schottländer presents Listening with Rocks — a combined performance and workshop that invites participants into an expanded practice of listening, attuning to the temporalities and agencies of the non-human world of rocks.

The session is part of Nana Francisca Schottländer’s ongoing artistic research into the performative and transformative potentials of intimate encounters and exchanges between human and lithic bodies in the series HEAVY KINSHIP (2016 – ). Introduced by Lukas Lund and conceptualised and facilitated by Nana Francisca Schottländer, the session engages with stones as companions and co-listeners, offering an encounter with forms of time, memory, and resonance that vastly exceed human perception. Rocks hold traces of deep geological histories and movements; they invite us to slow down and shift into rhythms beyond the immediacy of human scales. Through a guided performative and embodied exploration, participants will experiment with touching, sensing, and “listening through” stones — cultivating subtle forms of attunement to their materiality and presence.

Framed within the conceptual lens of “third listening” — a key focus of the 2025 edition of The Listening Biennial — the session seeks to move beyond listening as a purely auditory act. Instead, it opens a relational space where listening becomes multisensory, affective, and speculative: a mode of encountering other agencies, other ways of knowing, and other forms of coexistence. In this shared exploration, participants are invited to consider how we might listen with rocks, rather than merely to them, and how such practices might reconfigure our understanding of connection, interdependence, and planetary entanglement.

After the performance, we will unfold a workshop attempting to critically reflect on and share with each in what ways we may learn from and attend to the listening with rocks.

Date:  Tuesday 30th of September, 2025

Time: 15:30–17:30

Location: Overgaden, Copenhagen, Overgaden neden Vandet 17, 1414, Copenhagen

Organizers: Bureau for Listening, Overgaden, Copenhagen, Kritisk Masse // Critical Mass. The event is part of the The Listening Biennial programme in Copenhagen running through September and October.

It’s free to participate, but due to limited space, we ask you to sign up through this link.

 

Nana Francisca Schottländer (b. 1977, DK) is a Copenhagen-based artist working across choreography, performance, video, and installation. Using the body as a living tool for research and creation, her practice explores immersive, co-creational encounters with other-than-human entities and phenomena — from rocks and fungi to tides, soil, and landscapes marked by human intervention. Drawing on science, philosophy, and embodied knowledge, her work unfolds through long-duration investigations and site-specific performances that act as micro-laboratories for exchange between audience, place, and environment. Schottländer’s projects span installations, choreographed events, video works, and performative interventions in public space.

Lukas Quist Lund (b. 1997, DK) is a philosopher, art historian, and organiser working with interdisciplinary practices from a centre of philosophical and artistic “wondering.” He explores alternative research-action-methodologies and extra-institutional initiatives and projects, including TRAVERS, SHOUT, The Resting Labs (2024–), Center for Not-Knowing (2024–), 89–sound art learning community (2025–), and Bureau for Listening (2021–), of which he is the artistic director. Bureau for Listening is an artist and research group and publishing platform, investigating and promoting listening as a critical, empathic, and artistic practice that operates nomadically and transdisciplinarily, and strives to engage others in shared practices and projects.

The Listening Biennial is an international artistic and research initiative that highlights listening as a relational capacity—a philosophical, political, creative, and research-driven practice .

The Biennial operates as a decentralized global platform, commissioning audio works, performances, and discursive programs across cities. Embracing radical empathy, ecological attunement, sonic storytelling, and interspecies dialogues, it asks: how can listening dismantle exclusion, human exceptionalism, and entrenched power structures?

Since its launch in 2021, The Listening Biennial has grown through local “manifestations” with partner venues and institutions. It also runs the Listening Academy, a series of workshops and seminars on listening as creative practice, in cities like Berlin, Delhi, Hong Kong, and Skopje.

Under a network of artists, curators, scholars, and collectives, the Biennial fosters an ecology of attention, encouraging participatory, attuned, and diverse listening cultures worldwide.

O—Overgaden (founded 1986, Copenhagen) is one of Denmark’s leading non-profit art institutions dedicated to emerging practices in contemporary art. Through its renowned Open Call, it provides a vital platform for young and experimental voices, presenting around eight large-scale exhibitions annually alongside performances, screenings, talks, and concerts. Situated on Christianshavn’s canal, O—Overgaden has been a stepping stone for artists such as Olafur Eliasson and Lea Porsager, fostering bold, site-specific, and interdisciplinary projects that challenge and expand the field of contemporary art. Admission is always free.

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Documentation

We will update this site after the event with different forms of ‘documentation’ and extended material gathered and produced in relation to the spiral lecture.